In other news, we are no longer shopping at Footlocker

As if child slave labor in China wasn’t bad enough, Footlocker’s reputation took another hit recently when a Twitter used named @Thegoodfella_ tweeted a photo of a five foot rat went viral on the web. Don’t worry though: an animal curator quoted by The Huffington Post, the creature, allegedly found in a Bronx store earlier this year (the photo was uploaded on Facebook earlier this year before it made the Twitter rounds) promised that “no way it’s a common sewer rat.”
“I’m 90 percent certain that it’s a a Gambian pouched rat,” said Dr. Robert S. Voss, the Curator of Mammals at The American Museum of Natural History in New York. And apparently Gambian rats are pretty docile. So if you trip over one of these horrific fellas while doing inventory, don’t worry! It probably didn’t come crawling out of your toilet. It’s just a freak incident, at least until we find out the whole thing was a hoax to begin with.

NO!.. the rate IS DEFINITELY NOT FIVE feet long!! NOT that big... the photographer is using a cheap trick called "forced perspective"...
The implement the rat is on is a "concrete scraper".. the blade of which is only 8"-9" wide... by having it held forward .. away from the man and much closer to the camera "forces" you to use the man as a comparison with the rat for size estimation and because of that makes it look like the blade is 24" or more wide. IF he lowered it down so it was laying on the box at the mans feet, the rat would barely be as long as the length of the box.. tail included!
WHICH is the entire reason WHY the rat is not held close to anything for an accurate size comparison from which we could gauge a more correct estimation of its size, we would quickly see that it is just a normal size rat.